


the night is coming to an end.

by thequeenofokay



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Terminal Illnesses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-23
Updated: 2016-04-23
Packaged: 2018-06-03 21:27:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,222
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6627130
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thequeenofokay/pseuds/thequeenofokay
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first thing Kara does after she’s given her prognosis is write a bucket list.</p><p> </p><p>    <i>Things to do before I die.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	the night is coming to an end.

**Author's Note:**

  * For [skyepoots](https://archiveofourown.org/users/skyepoots/gifts).



> \+ i keep telling myself i will absolutely never write an aos fic again and then i'm like actually. i'll just finish off that old draft. so i finished a really sad six month old draft.
> 
> \+ also maybs its obvious but warning for death and terminal illness.
> 
> \+ title from "truce" by twenty one pilots.

 The first thing Kara does after she’s given her prognosis is write a bucket list.

_Things to do before I die._

Some of them were a little soppy, like remembering to tell her mom she loves her. Number twelve is screw the guy from the support group Shield assigned her to. It would be nice, but… she can live without it (die without it?). Number one is visit her childhood home again.

The second thing she does is quit Shield.

It’s their fault she’s ruined. It’s their fault for not organising a proper extraction, for letting her get captured –

It’s their fault she was tortured and experimented on, and their fault she’s dying, slowly.

She won’t give them any more of herself before she’s gone.

 

**

 

Grant asks her out on a date at the end of their Friday support group session. They’re standing under the yellow street lights, which probably make her look even sicker.

‘Really?’ she asks.

He shrugs. ‘What have I got to lose?’

She nods. It’s a fair point. It’s always a fair point for them now. ‘Sure,’ she says. ‘Is tomorrow good?’

‘I’ve got nothing better to do,’ he says. ‘I can pick you up at eight.’

‘Sure,’ she says again. ‘Pick me up at eight. I’ll text you the address.’ She turns away, down the dark street towards the subway and she can’t help the ridiculous smile that spreads across her face.

 

**

 

She knocks on his door at just before eight the next evening. Grant stares at her, confused. ‘I thought I was supposed to be picking you up,’ he says.

‘You were.’ She gives him a resolute, there’s no need to argue about this sort of look. ‘Can you still drive?’ she asks.

‘Uh,’ he says. ‘Yeah. Sure.’

‘Can we go for a drive?’ she asks. ‘I’ve… I can’t any longer. And I’d like to go somewhere.’

He nods, grabbing car keys from the dresser by the door. ‘Where do you want to go?’ he asks.

Kara tugs at her hair. ‘Home,’ she says. ‘It’s okay if you don’t want to take me – it’s a few days drive away. I’d understand.’

The split second he takes to consider what she’s asking stretches out in Kara’s mind. ‘Okay,’ he says. ‘Just let me grab a few things.’

She stands in stunned silence for a moment as he moves around in his apartment, and she realises she’d never expected him to just _agree_. He has no reason to help her. No one helps her.

He leads her down to his car. For the first half an hour they don’t talk much, aside from the directions she gives him.

When they’re on open road, he glances across at her. ‘What did you do, before?’ he asks.

‘I was a murderer,’ she says, without hesitating.

He almost smiles. ‘So Operations, then?’ he says.

‘Yeah.’ She stares out the passenger window. ‘I was a specialist. And I was good at it, too.’ It cost her, it cost her everything, but she’d been brilliant while it lasted. ‘They gave me a number. I was Agent 33.’

She thinks he raises an eyebrow a little. Maybe he’s heard of her.

‘I was too,’ he says. He takes a few minutes to elaborate, but she doesn’t press. ‘I’ve been with Shield for… ten years now? I’ve been shot, stabbed, even tortured for Shield, but I survived it all, you know?’ She can feel his eyes on her, and she nods slightly. ‘And then it’s this—’ He breaks off, almost laughing. ‘Then it’s _cancer_ that gets me in the end.’

He shakes his head slightly, still smiling in a twisted sort of way. ‘I was never supposed to go like this.’

She finally turns to him. ‘No,’ she says. ‘It was supposed to be with a bang, right?’

He hums in agreement.

He doesn’t ask her what it is that’s killing her. She’s never really explained it in their support group. Somehow, though, she _wants_ to tell him now.

‘I was taken by Hydra,’ she says. ‘They tried to strip me of who I was. They tortured me and brainwashed me and… I don’t even know everything they did to me. They broke me. And Shield…’ She takes a deep, shaking breath. ‘Shield did nothing. Not until it was far, far too late, anyway.’

‘We could kill them,’ he says, as calmly as if he was saying “we could get coffee”, ‘if you think it would make you feel better.’

‘Kill them?’ she repeats.

He nods. ‘If you think it would give you closure.’

Kara stares at him. ‘You’d help me?’ she asks. ‘You’d do that for me?’

He shrugs. ‘What do I have to lose?’

‘True,’ she concedes.

‘So what do you say?’ he asks.

She takes a second, still staring, to weigh it up. ‘No,’ she decides. ‘I’m too tired. It wouldn’t do me any good.’

He nods like he understands, and she can tell he won’t press her into it.

 

**

 

They stop at a little motel on the side of the road when Grant decides he’s too tired to drive any further. It’s got a diner on the side, and they sit across from each other in one of the booths. Kara orders herself a huge burger that close to drips with fat and a strawberry milkshake.

‘Isn’t that bad for you?’ Grant asks. He’s smiling at her in an endearing sort of way.

She grins, taking a bite. ‘Probably,’ she says. ‘But what does it matter?’

He shakes his head, still smiling at her as he eats his own dinner. There’s a comfortable warmth in her chest that, she realises with a start, is _happiness_. Her hands shake with it slightly as she takes another bite, savouring the moment. She wants to remember this for the rest of her short life.

Their motel room has only one bed, and Grant immediately offers to see if there’s another room or a spare mattress so that he can sleep on the floor, or something equally as chivalrous, but she shakes her head.

‘It’s fine. Really. Besides,’ she says, pausing to smile ruefully at the sentiment she knows he’ll understand, ‘nightmares.’

She is in bed before him. She curls under the covers, listening to him as he checks the locks on the windows and the door, as he carefully tucks a gun under his pillow.

When he finally slides into the bed beside her, she rolls over to face him. ‘I wanted to ask you something.’

‘Go on,’ he says. He’s studying her carefully in the darkness, and she feels as though sharing a bed with him should be odder than it is.

‘Do you think I’m pretty?’ she asks. She gestures to her face. ‘Even with the scar?’

‘Yes,’ he says. He doesn’t pause to think about it. Not for a second.

‘Okay,’ she says. ‘Thank you.’

‘Is that all you wanted to ask?’

She wants to asks, “ _What is this? Other than a strange first date?”_ but she doesn’t know how to, so she shifts closer to him in the small bed, and when he doesn’t stop her, she kisses him softly.

His hand moves slowly through her hair. He tastes like metal, but maybe that’s the blood from her own mouth. It’s cliché, yet fitting when she thinks she’s not felt so alive in a long time.

 

**

 

She sleeps, curled in his arms, until four in the morning – the longest in months. She wakes scared and disorientated, and then immediately nauseous. She runs for the bathroom and he follows her. He holds her hair as she throws up bloody sick into the toilet.

Afterwards, she sits on the bathroom floor and he wipes her face with a damp cloth, more gently than she’d have thought him capable of.

‘Radiation poisoning did this to you?’ he asks quietly. There’s an anger hidden behind his words that she almost misses, directed not at her but at everyone who is responsible for this happening to her.

She shrugs. ‘Or the torture,’ she croaks out, her throat raw.

‘How long do you have?’ he asks quietly.

She has to take a shaking breath before she can answer. It hurts and it _terrifies_ her just to think about it. ‘I was given a few weeks at my last appointment.’

He nods. His thumb traces gently across her cheek. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he says.

‘It’s not your fault.’ She leans into his touch, grounding herself to it.

‘I know,’ he says. ‘But has anyone else apologised to you?’

He’s right. She shifts so she’s leaning against his chest, and his arms wrap immediately around her. She is oddly comfortable with letting him designate himself as her protector. There is a safety in it, and she senses that he needs the purpose of his new role.

She doesn’t mean to fall asleep, but when she opens her eyes again she’s back in the bed, and there is sunlight streaming through the gap in the curtains. Grant is settled on the bed next to her, a book in his lap.

He smiles when he sees her waking up. She wants to wake up to that smile until she’s ninety, but she supposes a few weeks will have to do instead.

 

**

 

It’s late afternoon when they reach her old house.

They stand outside, on the other side of the street. There’s a new family living there now. Kara can see them through the window. It hurts, a gnawing in the pit of her stomach that says she should have had this.

It’s not _fair._

‘Is it how you remember it?’ he asks. He wraps an arm gently around her, and she leans back into it.

‘No,’ she says. ‘Not exactly.’

‘Tell me,’ he says. He gives her hand a comforting little squeeze.

She nods. ‘There was… a tree in the garden. This big tree that we used to climb in the summer. I fell once – I was trying to climb highest. I broke my arm, but my parents didn’t realise until the next day. I tried to hide it from them because I thought they’d be angry at me for being so reckless.’

‘Were they?’ Grant asks.

She almost laughs. ‘No. Of course not. I got the “you need to be more careful” lecture, but they weren’t angry.’

‘Sounds nice,’ he says, and there’s something wistful in his voice.

‘Your family weren’t like that?’ she asks.

‘No,’ he says. His voice is quiet. Not bitter or angry, just… sad. ‘They weren’t.’

‘What happened to them?’ she asks.

‘Nothing,’ he says. ‘They’re out there, somewhere. I missed my chance to stop them, so I try not to think about them instead.’

‘They don’t know?’

‘That I’m dying?’ He shakes his head. ‘No. They don’t know.’

She nods. She stares at her house a few moments longer. She watches the family in the window laughing. She _wants_ it with a desperation she can hardly comprehend. For as long as she has left, she wants that beautiful, happy normality.

She wants it with Grant.

She grips his hand. ‘We can go now,’ she says. She doesn’t want to waste any more time staring at her past.

‘You sure?’ he asks, and she nods.

‘I’m sure.’

 

**

 

The drive back is different. There is something final about it.

They stay in a motel again. She doesn’t have to think, this time, about climbing into the bed beside him. She curls against his side, his arms slightly too tight around her, like he knows she’s close to slipping away.

They don’t sleep. They don’t speak much, either. They hold each other, and she focusses on his breathing, the feel of the rise and fall of his chest against her.

‘I love you,’ she says finally, into the dark. Usually it’s not the kind of thing she’d say to a man she, really, hardly knows. But she’s not got the kind of time to hesitate about telling him.

She feels him lean down to press a kiss to her ear. ‘I love you,’ he murmurs, and if they weren’t so close she wouldn’t be able to hear him.

She finds his hand and grips on tight. ‘I’ll wait for you,’ she says. ‘I promise. I’ll be there on the other side. We won’t be alone.’

She can feel him take another breath, somehow more ragged than usual. ‘Thank you,’ he says. There’s a pause. ‘If I—’ he breaks off, takes a deep breath ‘—if I die before you, I’ll wait too. I promise.’

Kara can feel her hand shaking slightly in his. She presses her eyes shut, leaning into him as she tries to steady herself. ‘Tell me it’s going to be okay.’

His free hand moves to her chin, tilting it so she’s looking up at him in the darkness. ‘We’ll be together,’ he says, and there’s a certainty in his voice, in his eyes that finally lets the fear that’s always there in her stomach—the constant fear of dying _so young_ —calm slightly.

She almost smiles, because otherwise she thinks she might cry. Whatever happens, it will be okay.

 

**

 

(She goes first. She hangs on to life by her fingertips for another miraculous three months, but eventually it is too much.

All he can think is _please, please, don’t let me wait too long_.)


End file.
